Endless Space 2 Announced, First Trailer Released

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Endless Space was a fine 4X strategy game with interesting, distinct races and a best-in-class interface. Then Amplitude Studios’ follow-up was Endless Legend, a fantasy 4X game set within the same universe which was best-in-class in general. In fact, we named it the best game of 2014.

A little cryptic, no? If you can’t watch it right now: a starship travels around a planet and a voiceover says, “What if I could begin again? I had reached perfect harmony, before they came and destroyed everything. But sometimes you just need a single drop to change everything.” That’s it.

More interesting is that the ship that flies by is the one that you could repair in Engless Legend and use to leave the planet. This was added as one of the victory conditions back in March; look at the ship in the header artwork in that post and compare it to the one in the trailer. The victory condition was achievable by any faction, though the logo on the side of the ship in the trailer belongs to Endless Space’s Hissho faction.

Arguably this means that Endless Space 2 could equally be considered a sequel to Endless Legend, and Amplitude are no strangers to this kind of cross-game story work. Dungeon of the Endless, another of their games, took place on a spaceship from Endless Space that had crash landed onto the planet from Endless Legend. This spaceship? I’m not informed enough to know.

As per Amplitude’s other game’s, they’re making use of their Games2Gether system through which they encourage participation among their community in the service of both designing and promoting the game. Right now there’s very little other information, but we’ll see more next week at Gamescom.

41 Comments

When ES was still very new, I signed up for Games2Gether. I entered a single suggestion: I wanted to be able to zoom all the way out and still see the entirety of the strategic situation at once (normally, empire colors / star lanes / all details disappear and it is not possible to see everything at once). This seemed like an obvious oversight and I expected they’d make this adjustment.

One of the mods took my post and said that it was a duplicate of one of his: “seamless zooming between all levels from planet- to galaxy- level” (or something like that). This allowed him to remove my post and +1 his post. The mod removed any objections, or later, complaints, that I posted.

So, I have no faith in their stupidumb system. Insert grumpy face here.

This is space. It’s sometimes called the final frontier. (Except that of course you can’t have a final frontier, because there’d be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it’s pretty penultimate.)

That is their normal mode of work now. Both EL and DotE were released in early stages – which, mind, were far more polished than most “finished” Steam EA products – too, and this concept actually works rather well with their “games2gether” community sharing and cooperation system.

Yeah, I played Endless Legend when it was barely released in Early Access as an “alpha”, and it was quite playable even then.
The funny thing is that that was the last time I played it, and decided, just this evening, to give it a shot again, and came to RPS while it was still downloading to see this article!

Check your own links, I do believe this ship is intended to be the same ship you get for completing the Quest ending of Endless Legend, where you find an alien starship buried in the caves and get it working and get the hell off the planet before it freezes.

They have to fix single player campagin. ES and EL have unfortunately pretty blank SP. Endless Space seems unfinished even after expansion. I like many things it does :interface, resources (yes! but give me even more and unique of them !) but combat is meh, and pacing is off, generally the moment whole galaxy is settled, someone reaches one of victory condition. Also, and it goes towards Firaxis as well, give me a proper ending ! This, sudden , The end and score screen, this is terrible. Think of something that would make those hours count. Even Paradox games EU and CK went for more robust end screen.

Yes!! I was hoping they’d return here for the next project. Very much looking forward to this.

If they can address the “lack of depth” criticism of the first Endless Space (which I think they accomplished with Legend), and find the right balance of user control vs. automation with tactical combat (which is still a problem with Legend), they’ll have something special.

With Amplitude’s UI polish and art style, we’ll have at least one new space 4X that doesn’t look like the devs were too cheap to hire a good art director, and just had a programmer do the graphics.

Wait, are we not going to be insisting that this be referred to as Endless Space_2 like with Watch_Dogs? The underscore seems that much egregious for appearing between word and number when there’s actually two words in the title.

I never played a 4X game before Civ Beyond Earth, and I only tried that one because of a Free Weekend; I really liked the concept, never played something similar before, so I started to research other options within the genre. Found Sword of The Stars, Sins of a Solar Empire, Pandora (which is very similar to Civ: BE) and this Endless Space, that I ended up buying with Steam trading cards money; I loved the game, the UI, the resource gathering and all, but after I finished a match, that took me a dozen hours to accomplish, I’ve felt…. Empty…. I don’t know why, but I never came back again, and those other 4X games? Never considered buying them after that.

A common issue with the empire games is that the “journey”, especially the earlier parts of it, is much more fun than the “destination” (aka late-game grind).
As for the “most acclaimed”, there’s also Galactic Civilizations 2 (good AI, even though personally I find it boring – Gal Civ 3 is still a bit rough I hear…), Distant Worlds (heavy price tag, but unique automation systems and economy allowing for HUGE games), Civilization 4 (RPS n=°1 strategy game) and Alpha Centauri (unrivaled in atmosphere and the deepest civ-like combat there is) :link to gog.com
(There’s also the classics like Master of Orion 2, which might feel a bit old depending on your preferences…)

Also you have to understand that many of these games are VERY different from each other : some of them might have a very heavy focus on tactical combat (Sword of the Stars 1), while others might not have any tactical combat whatsoever (GalCiv2) – so you really can’t judge the whole “empire” genre by just one game…

I like your way of thinking, lol, the journey is much more fun than the destination… Indeed, that’s what I’ve felt playing Civ: BE, and Endless Space also made me feel like that, I mean, it doesn’t matter if you were victorious, all the things you’ve done were fun nevertheless…. Maybe I should give it another go.

And about the other games, you’re right again, we can’t judge the whole genre by only one game. You know, I might actually keep my eyes open for more news of Endless Space_2!

Colour me excited. I dive back into EL every couple of months to try out a new faction and see how they run (Mezari/Vaulters are my favourite so far, that teleporting mechanic is a lifesaver). I’ve considered picking up ES, but I’ve read that Amplitude only really hit its stride with EL, and at that price I’m not quite tempted enough to risk not liking it. It’s not like we’re exactly hurting for space-based 4X games anyways.

That said, Amplitude have been on a roll lately and I have no doubts that we’ll see some great new innovations to the genre with ES2. I do hope that they manage to strike a better balance between faction characterization and playstyle freedom than they did with EL, though. It occasionally feels like you are confined to specific strategies for certain races if you hope to achieve victory in that game (with the exception of the Drakken, who are kind of overpowered), which is a little disappointing. It often feels like a whole 600 turn game is spent building upon a specific strategy you adopted in turn 1, rather than adapting your tactics to your changing circumstances.

Everyone keeps raving about how great the interface is. Care to explain why it’s so great to someone who’s never played ES (but has played other space-based 4x games)? All screen shots are telling me is that it’s pretty minimalist for the genre.

That’s why. By being minimalist it looks good, especially compared with the deluge of tiny icons, tiny text, or even spreadsheets you often see in other empire games. And they managed to do that while keeping it quite functional!

It just isn’t getting it right for me – bland races, bland tech trees. Interface is clean… to the point of leaving me wanting a little more information, especially with regards to how well all the civs are going.

And Rob Zacny from Three Moves Ahead has ruined me – why do I have to design all of the ships? Why can’t I have some more default designs that do an OK job? What is it with Space 4X’s that require this?

That said, there really is a lot to like, but it just isn’t seizing me. I have come out with a great appreciation of Amplitude Studio’s work though – on that free weekend I dabbled with all of their games and they are stylish and well though out pieces of work. I really dont want to bounce of Endless Space.

You play as an arid planet that used to have lots of water, probably a lush climate and dense vegetation. Then intelligent life appeared and drank all your water. Now you need a single drop to change everything.

If the trend continues, Endless Space 2 will be an amazing 4X with a decent UI.

Sounds good to me, frankly. Endless Space had so much about it that could have been better, could have been more fun, could have been more memorable or charming. So the potential here is huge. Dare I hope for a game to finally exceed the MoO bar?

I liked the mechanics and UI of ES, but the game and its setting lacked personality. Messing with spreadsheets is fine if you feel like it’s achieving something tangible in a galaxy with real cultures and characters, but this game had none. It was just twiddling numbers in the end.

I really hope the new game fixes this. I haven’t played Endless Legend yet but from what I can tell, that game does a lot better in this department. So there is a chance that they’ve learned a few things that make it into ES2.